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View the Past to Verify History, Look to the Future to See How Things Came Out
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January 2000 - Hollywood, CA -- If you're like most Americans, according to a new national poll, you'd rather journey into the past to "verify history" than into the future "to see how things come out" -- if time travel were possible. And more than 60 percent of those surveyed think it is, with another seven percent of us convinced that time travel has already happened, but "we just don't know about it -- yet."
A poll of 1,100 viewers by the national cable TV show Dateline: USA revealed that more than 40 percent of the respondents would choose a trip into the future to see "what's going to happen" or "how things turn out for my children" or "how the stock market is going to perform in 50 years."
But nearly all had the same proviso: being able to both return to where you started, intact (no damage to DNA or molecular structure was a key concern), and to use in the present the information -- on the market or the outcome of major sports events -- you collected in the future. Even, the poll indicated, if it somehow changes the future.
Citing a range of books and movies about voyages in time -- from the New York Times bestselling L. Ron Hubbard - Dave Wolverton novel A Very Strange Trip to Michael Crichton's Time Line to Contact and Back to the Future -- respondents to the Dateline: USA poll, confident that time travel is possible, also believe that either the technology already exists in some form, or that it has already been used -- and the government isn't telling us to prevent panic or that a dangerous "time travel technology" race is developing with other countries.
Of the preponderant 56 percent who agreed they'd like to travel into the past -- largely preferring a Back to the Future automobile or A Very Strange Trip time machine and vehicle to Contact's space-time "wormhole" as a congenial way to make the trip -- more than half said they'd like to visit the Jazz Age of the 1920's or the Depression Years of the 1930's -- "where so much of modern medicine, literature, music and popular entertainment began to flower." Smaller percentages, meanwhile, opted for the Old West, Ancient Rome, Elizabethan England or the Egyptian court of Cleopatra "if she looked like Elizabeth Taylor."
Among the leading candidates for times and places people would least like to visit -- with a collective total of 26 percent of those polled by Dateline: USA -- were the Ice Age ("too cold"), the Jurassic Era ("too many Dinosaurs") and the Middle Ages ("a hard, dark, desperate time").
And, finally, some four percent of respondents said they didn't want to travel in time -- "I can't think of any place I'd be happier in than here and now" -- but acknowledged that they love to read about time travel or see it dramatized on the screen.
Bev Widder
Dateline Communications
310-581-2680
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